The Irish writer William Trevor, who contributed dozens of short stories to The New Yorker over nearly four decades, has died at the age of eighty-eight. Trevor, who was born in 1928, in County Cork, Ireland, and who began his career as a sculptor and a copywriter, published more than forty volumes of fiction in his long career, including numerous novels, novellas, and plays. But he was best known as a master of the short story, a form whose strength, he once told The Paris Review, “lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.”
Trevor’s talents often drew comparisons to Chekhov and to Joyce—Graham Greene called his book “Angels at the Ritz” “one of the best collections, if not the best, since James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners.’ ” In a 1992 New Yorker article, Stephen Schiff described the milieu of a typical Trevor story, which often told of life in small-town Ireland and England: “As certainly as there is a bluegrass-and-swimming-pool suburbia that will forever be remembered as Cheever Country, there must also be a Trevor Territory: backward villages in England or Ireland with narrow streets full of dogs and bicycles and small boys and nuns, and, here and there, the odd dwarf or sex-crazed town simpleton.”
You can listen to Jhumpa Lahiri read Trevor’s story “A Day” on The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and browse the complete list of his stories and personal essays from the magazine’s archive. As Lahiri, who cites Trevor as one of her major influences, says, “There’s a gentleness, a reassuring quality" to his fiction. "It’s such an embrace to read his work.”
